A Massachusetts bill that would better protect children born through assisted reproduction, surrogacy, and to unmarried same-sex parents will get a hearing next Tuesday, November 9. Learn more and find out how you can help all children have equal access to legal parentage!
Two recent state supreme court rulings, in Alaska and Idaho, underline the wildly different requirements same-sex parents may face to prove their parenthood.
A lesbian who wants to become a foster parent for a child in a taxpayer-funded program for unaccompanied refugee children was unable to do so because the government is working through an agency that discriminates against LGBTQ people. Now she’s suing.
Two women ex-partners are cooperatively suing the state of Nebraska for full, equal parentage rights over the children they had together. The case could mean the further expansion of voluntary acknowledgments of parentage—simple, free forms to establish legal parentage—to parents of all genders.
It is many a queer parent’s nightmare: your child’s sperm donor sues for paternity. When it happened to Robin Young and Sandy Russo in 1991, it precipitated a landmark four-year court battle that indelibly marked 9-year-old Ry Russo-Young and her 11-year-old sister Cade. Yet Ry, now an award-winning filmmaker, had never really been able to process her feelings about what happened. Her attempt to do so, and to understand the other side of the story, led her to create Nuclear Family, a three-part documentary that premieres this Sunday on HBO.
After a lawsuit by a queer mom, insurance giant Aetna has said it improperly denied her fertility coverage and will review similar cases. Whether this means a larger change towards equal treatment of LGBTQ people under their policies remains an open question.
The Texas abortion ban that was just upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court is a hugely frightening development for anyone who can get pregnant and for anyone who cares about reproductive rights, including not only abortion access but also assisted reproduction. That’s enough to make it a queer issue—but it has even more possible ramifications for other civil and human rights issues, including LGBTQ rights.
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and his husband Chasten have become parents. This puts them among the highest-visibility LGBTQ parents in the country, and that visibility has the potential to help further the acceptance of LGBTQ parents as a whole. They cannot, however, do this alone.
President Joe Biden has recently nominated Charlotte Sweeney, a Colorado employee rights attorney, to the federal judiciary, and reappointed Sharon Kleinbaum, a New York rabbi, to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. Both are also lesbian moms.
A humorous but pointed new video from Family Equality shows two dads answering their child’s question of “Where do babies come from?” by discussing lawyers, home studies, and bias against queer families. It reminds us that the path to parenthood for LGBTQ people is still full of obstacles and inequalities. Watch it here, just in time for Parents’ Day this Sunday, July 25.
